A Persian Quatrain for the Times

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My hands are not clean

You know what I mean

Appearance only matters

Truth is rarely seen

 

We importantly convened

And then our rooms were cleaned

By low-wage workers

That we claim somewhere in our schemes

 

We drank on the patio till late

Local and organic all the food we ate

A chance encounter with a ‘dozer* operator

Was a chance for the self-important to denigrate

 

Our ancestors’ bodies were commodities

Now we treat economics as an oddity

It doesn’t seem to glitter

Like the Ivory Tower scraps we codify

 

Yawning at our own contradictions

Yelling to each other we are above affliction

I write this on a computer

Built in slavery conditions

 

Below immigration trails are money flows

Hatred reigns when competition grows

We reject material reality

To obsess over celluloid woes

 

At base is a question we rarely debate

Who benefits from our acceptance of this fate?

As we play at loyal opposition

We maintain the hegemony of the corporate state

*Bull-dozer